NEWS
- Activists: The Bottom Line for '99
-Liberte, Egalite, Parite
-NOW Does Hollywood
-Opinion: Abortion and Crime
-Women on the Verge of 2000
-Mexico City's Women Traffic Cops
-Opinion: Guns and Lobsters
-Indian Women Sue Canadian Feds
- Under Fire: The Year of the Gun

<author of The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing (Aunt Lute Books, 1998)>
First, I will carry The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (HarperCollins, 1999), by Milan Kundera. It's a heady, contemplative, beautiful work about loss, about the irreplaceable loss of magic. It's also innovative structurally--as all of my choices are. We need more of this kind of innovation. I think there's something absolute about the Victorian novel--it says "This is the truth," "This is our climax," "This is our resolution." Kundera tells us that, in fact, the truth is very subjective.
I will also take John Dollar (Simon & Schuster, 1999), by Marianne Wiggins, one of the most underappreciated novels of our time. It's about girls shipwrecked on an island and it reveals--very subtly, so you really have to trust your own reading--the cruelty of the "girl world." I have always believed that we women need greater knowledge of our complexity. We are more flawed than we are willing to admit, and our desire to be perfectly good stops us from fully exploring ourselves, from actualizing ourselves.
Last, I'll carry A Pale View of Hills (Vintage, 1990), by Kazuo Ishiguro. The power of this novel is contained in the absolutely perfect ambiguity, the precariousness and emotional power of a few perfectly placed passages.